NPR News

The Obama administration announced new fuel efficiency standards that require cars in the United States to average 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025.

As the Detroit Free-Press reports, President Obama got this process rolling in 2010, when he asked the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to come up with standards that would lead to new and cleaner cars on the roads.

The nation's foreclosure crisis rarely is mentioned by the presidential candidates, but it looms large as their campaigns grapple with finding evicted voters in swing states.

Organizers are discovering scores of vacated homes in key battlegrounds that contributed strong turnouts in the 2008 election. In the past four years, more than 3.7 million homes have been lost to foreclosure, according to market research firm CoreLogic.

Okay, so Bic has been taking a lot of flack for selling this pen "for her." (As it says on its web site, it is "a ball pen essentially for women," although that seems to invite a caveat, such as, "although there may be certain men to whom it appeals and we don't judge.")

The GOP's proposed platform supports a federal ban on same-sex marriage. But gay and lesbian Republicans say the party is changing. Host Michel Martin checks in with two Republicans making their issues more visible at the convention: R. Clarke Cooper of the Log Cabin Republicans and Sarah Longwell of Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry.